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About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self
Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980
By Michel Foucault, Graham Burchell The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-26629-9
CHAPTER 1
Subjectivity and Truth
17 November 1980
In a work consecrated to the moral treatment of madness and published in 1840, a French psychiatrist, Leuret, tells of the manner in which he has treated one of his patients — treated and, as you can imagine, of course, cured. One morning, Dr. Leuret takes Mr. A., his patient, into a shower room. He makes him recount in detail his delirium.
"Well, all that," says the doctor, "is nothing but madness. Promise me not to believe in it anymore."
The patient hesitates, then promises.
"That's not enough," replies the doctor. "You already made similar promises, and you haven't kept them." And the doctor turns on a cold shower above the patient's head.
"Yes, yes! I am mad!" the patient cries.
The shower is turned off, and the interrogation is resumed.
"Yes, I recognize that I am mad," the patient repeats, adding, "I recognize because you are forcing me to do so."
Another shower. Another confession. The interrogation is taken up again.
"I assure you, however," says the patient, "that I have heard voices and seen enemies around me."
Another shower.
"Well," says Mr. A., the patient, "I admit it. I am mad; all that was madness."
To make someone suffering from mental illness recognize that he is mad is a very ancient procedure. Everybody in the old medicine, before the middle of the nineteenth century, everybody was convinced of the incompatibility between madness and recognition of madness. And in the works, for instance, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one finds many examples of what one might call truth-therapies. The mad would be cured if one managed to show them that their delirium is without any relation to reality.
But, as you see, the technique used by Leuret is altogether different. He is not trying to persuade his patient that his ideas are false or unreasonable. What happens in the head of Mr. A. is a matter of indifference for the doctor. Leuret wishes to obtain a precise act: the explicit affirmation "I am mad." It is easy to recognize here the transposition within psychiatric therapy of procedures which have been used for a long time in judicial and religious institutions. To declare aloud and intelligibly the truth about oneself — I mean, to confess — has in the Western world been considered for a long time either as a condition for redemption for one's sins or an essential item in the condemnation of the guilty. The bizarre therapy of Leuret may be read as an episode in the progressive culpabilization of madness. But I would wish, rather, to take it as a point of departure for a more general reflection on this practice of confession and on the postulate, which is generally accepted in Western societies, that one needs for his own salvation to know as exactly as possible who he is and also, which is something rather different, that he needs to tell it as explicitly as possible to some other people. The anecdote of Leuret is here only as an example of the strange and complex relationships developed in our societies between individuality, discourse, truth, and coercion.
In order to justify the attention I am giving to what is seemingly so specialized a subject, let me take a step back for a moment. All that, after all, is only for me a means that I will use to take on a much more general theme — that is, the genealogy of the modern subject.
In the years that preceded the second war, and even more so after the second war, philosophy in France and, I think, in all continental Europe was dominated by the philosophy of the subject. I mean that philosophy set as its task par excellence the foundation of all knowledge and the principle of all signification as stemming from the meaningful subject. The importance given to this question of the meaningful subject was of course due to the impact of Husserl — only his Cartesian Meditations and the Crisis were generally known in France — but the centrality of the subject was also tied to an institutional context. For the French university, since philosophy began with Descartes, it could only advance in a Cartesian manner. But we must also take into account the political conjuncture. Given the absurdity of wars, slaughters, and despotism, it seemed then to be up to the individual subject to give meaning to his existential choices.
With the leisure and distance that came after the war, this emphasis on the philosophical subject no longer seemed so self-evident. Two hitherto-hidden theoretical paradoxes could no longer be avoided. The first one was that the philosophy of consciousness had failed to found a philosophy of knowledge, and especially scientific knowledge, and the second was that this philosophy of meaning paradoxically had failed to take into account the formative mechanisms of signification and the structure of systems of meaning. I am aware that another form of thought claimed then to have gone beyond the philosophy of the subject — this, of course, was Marxism. It goes without saying — and it goes indeed better if we say it — that neither materialism nor the theory of ideologies successfully constituted a theory of objectivity or of signification. Marxism put itself forward as a humanistic discourse that could replace the abstract subject with an appeal to the real man, the concrete man. It should have been clear at the time that Marxism carried with it a fundamental theoretical and practical weakness: the humanistic discourse hid the political reality that the Marxists of this period nonetheless supported.
With the all too easy clarity of hindsight — what you call, I think, the "Monday morning quarterback" — let me say that there were two possible paths that led beyond this philosophy of the subject. First, the theory of objective knowledge and, two, an analysis of systems of meaning, or semiology. The first of these was the path of logical positivism. The second was that of a certain school of linguistics, psychoanalysis, and anthropology, all generally grouped under the rubric of structuralism.
These were not the directions I took. Let me announce once and for all that I am not a structuralist, and I confess with the appropriate chagrin that I am not an analytic philosopher — nobody is perfect. I have tried to explore another direction. I have tried to get out from the philosophy of the subject through a genealogy of the subject, by studying the constitution of the subject across history which had led us to the modern concept of the self. This has not always been an easy task, since most of historians prefer a history of social processes, and most philosophers prefer a subject without history. This has neither prevented me from using the same material that certain social historians have used, nor from recognizing my theoretical debt to those philosophers who, like Nietzsche, have posed the question of the historicity of the subject.
Up to the present, I have proceeded with this general project in two ways. I have dealt with the modern theoretical constructions that were concerned with the subject in general. I have tried to analyze, in a previous book, theories of the subject as a speaking, living, working being. I have also dealt with the more practical understanding formed in those institutions like hospitals, asylums, prisons, where certain subjects became objects of knowledge and at the same time objects of domination. And now I wish to study those forms of understanding which the subject creates about himself. Those forms of self- understanding are important, I think, to analyze the modern experience of sexuality.
But since I have started with this last type of project I have been obliged to change my mind on several important points. Let me introduce a kind of autocritique. It seems, according to some suggestions by Habermas, that one can distinguish three major types of techniques in human societies: the techniques which permit one to produce, to transform, to manipulate things; the techniques which permit one to use sign systems; and the techniques which permit one to determine the conduct of individuals, to impose certain wills on them, and to submit them to certain ends or objectives. That is to say, there are techniques of production, techniques of signification, and techniques of domination.
Of course, if one wants to study the history of natural sciences, it is useful if not necessary to take into account techniques of production and semiotic techniques. But since my project was concerned with the knowledge of the subject, I thought that the techniques of domination were the most important, without any exclusion of the rest. But, analyzing the experience of sexuality, I became more and more aware that there is in all societies, I think, in all societies whatever they are, another type of techniques: techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, or to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and so on. Let's call this kind of techniques a "techniques" or "technology of the self."
I think that if one wants to analyze the genealogy of the subject in Western civilization, he has to take into account not only techniques of domination but also techniques of the self. Let's say: he has to take into account the interaction between those two types of techniques — techniques of domination and techniques of the self. He has to take into account the points where the technologies of domination of individuals over one another have recourse to processes by which the individual acts upon himself. And conversely, he has to take into account the points where the techniques of the self are integrated into structures of coercion or domination. The contact point, where the way individuals are driven by others is tied to the way they conduct themselves, is what we can call, I think, government. Governing people, in the broad meaning of the word, is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between techniques which assure coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or modified by himself.
When I was studying asylums, prisons, and so on, I insisted, I think, too much on the techniques of domination. What we can call discipline is something really important in these kinds of institutions, but it is only one aspect of the art of governing people in our society. We must not understand the exercise of power as pure violence or strict coercion. Power consists in complex relations: these relations involve a set of rational techniques, and the efficiency of those techniques is due to a subtle integration of coercion-technologies and self- technologies. I think that we have to get rid of the more or less Freudian schema — you know it — the schema of interiorization of the law by the self. Fortunately, from a theoretical point of view, and maybe unfortunately from a practical point of view, things are much more complicated than that. In short, having studied the field of government by taking as my point of departure techniques of domination, I would like in years to come to study government — especially in the field of sexuality — starting from the techniques of the self.
Among those techniques of the self in this field of self-technology, I think that the techniques oriented toward the discovery and the formulation of the truth concerning oneself are extremely important; and if for the government of people in our societies everyone had not only to obey, but also to produce and publish the truth about oneself, then examination of conscience and confession are among the most important of those procedures. Of course, there is a very long and very complex history, from the Delphic precept gnothi seauton (know yourself) to the strange therapeutics promoted by Leuret, about which I was speaking in the beginning of this lecture. There is a very long way from one to the other, and I don't want, of course, to give you even a survey this evening. I'd like only to underline a transformation of those practices, a transformation which took place at the beginning of the Christian era, of the Christian period, when the ancient obligation of knowing oneself became the monastic precept "confess, to your spiritual guide, each of your thoughts." This transformation is, I think, of some importance in the genealogy of modern subjectivity. With this transformation starts what we could call the hermeneutics of the self. This evening I'll try to outline the way confession and self-examination were conceived by pagan philosophers, and next week I'll try to show you what it became in early Christianity.
* * *
It is well-known that the main objective of the Greek schools of philosophy did not consist of the elaboration, the teaching, of theory. The goal of the Greek schools of philosophy was the transformation of the individual. The goal of the Greek philosophy was to give the individual the quality which would permit him to live differently, better, more happily, than other people. What place did the self-examination and the confession have in this? At first glance, in all the ancient philosophical practices, the obligation to tell the truth about oneself occupies a rather restrained place. And this for two reasons, both of which remain valid throughout the whole Greek and Hellenistic antiquity. The first of those reasons is that the objective of philosophical training is to arm the individual with a certain number of precepts which permit him to conduct himself in all circumstances of life without his losing mastery of himself or without losing tranquility of spirit, purity of body and soul. From this principle stems the importance of the master's discourse. The master's discourse has to talk, to explain, to persuade; he has to give the disciple a universal code for all his life, so that the verbalization takes place on the side of the master and not on the side of the disciple.
There is also another reason why the obligation to confess does not have a lot of importance in the direction of antique conscience. The tie with the master was then circumstantial or, in any case, provisional. It was a relationship between two wills, which does not imply a complete or a definitive obedience. One solicits or one accepts the advice of a master or of a friend in order to endure an ordeal, a bereavement, an exile, or a reverse of fortune, and so on. Or again, one places oneself under the direction of a master for a certain time of one's life, so as one day to be able to behave autonomously and no longer have need of advice. Ancient direction tends toward the autonomy of the directed. In these conditions, one can understand that the necessity for exploring oneself in exhaustive depth does not present itself. It is not indispensable to say everything about oneself, to reveal one's least secrets, so that the master may exert complete power over one. The exhaustive and continual presentation of oneself under the eyes of an all-powerful director is not an essential feature in this technique of direction.
But despite this general orientation which has so little emphasis on self-examination and on confession, one finds well before Christianity already elaborated techniques for discovering and formulating the truth about oneself. And their role, it would seem, became more and more important. The growing importance of these techniques is no doubt tied to the development of communal life in the philosophical schools, as with the Pythagoreans or the Epicureans, and it is also tied to the value accorded to the medical model, either in the Epicurean or the Stoic schools.
Since it is not possible in so short a time even to give a sketch of this evolution in the Greek and Hellenist civilization, I'll take only two passages of a Roman philosopher, Seneca. They may be considered as rather good witnesses of this practice of self-examination and confession as it existed with the Stoics of the imperial period at the time of the birth of Christianity. The first passage is to be found in the De ira. Here is this passage; I'll read it to you:
What could be more beautiful than to conduct an inquest on one's day? What sleep better than that which follows this review of one's actions? How calm it is, deep and free, when the soul has received its portion of praise and blame, and has submitted itself to its own examination, to its own censure. Secretly, it makes the trial of its own conduct. I exercise this authority over myself, and each day I will myself as witness before myself. When my light is lowered and my wife at last is silent, I reason with myself and take the measure of my acts and my words. I hide nothing from myself; I spare myself nothing. Why, in effect, should I fear anything at all amongst my errors whilst I can say: "Be vigilant in not beginning it again; today I will forgive you. In a certain discussion, you spoke too aggressively or you did not correct the person you were reproaching, you offended him, ..." etc.
(Continues...)
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